Google Place case study in real time

What I will be doing is to get a dentist listed in the GP.
Why am I doing this? I want to prove to myself that I can do this before I try to do it for hire. And this will help me stay on task and not quit until the goal is reach as I have a bad habit of starting internet endeavors and not finishing them. Hopefully this will be of help to any of you that are also interested in this method.

How it began....last Friday after I finished cleaning Dr. M's carpets at his house he asked me if I get any business from the internet and our conversation ended with me promising him that I will get him on the first page of Big G with a GP listing and I will create a website for him (he's got neither). I've got some experience with GP as I was able to get my carpet cleaning listing to rank in GP but that was some years ago and as we all know GP has gone through a lot of changes and is probably still evolving. Which means I've got to learn some new chops if I want to do GP successfully today.

First thing I did was see if an EMD was available and dentistcity.org was still available so I grabbed that over the weekend. Although I don't think an EMD is all that important to get into GP. I'll be able to use the url when I create the citations.

Next I'm going to create his GP listing so to get the postcard verification sent out right away. I'm not sure if phone verification is still available anymore, if it is I'll go that route. I'll try to get this done tonight.

I may reveal the city as I don't see any harm in doing that, unless someone comes up with a compelling reason not to. G keyword tool says there is 3600 monthly searches for dentist city so he should get some leads if I can get his GP listing to rank at or near the top. If I can make that happen then it should be a piece of cake to get him to pay me for this.

Edit:
An auto generated listing exits and so phone verification is available. I'm not going to update the listing now until I notify his office to expect the phone call.

From my understanding.....you can get the phone verification IF the business already exists in GP. A good way to get them to appear automatically on GP is to create a good amount of citations on big sites like yelp, yellow pages, merchant circle etc. Then Big G will pick it up and add it.

Just got to make sure to ping those citation pages so they get indexed.

I've yet to try it, but I am on my way there given that I'm building a site for my future Local SEO business

Good luck buddy!

You might want to think about creating citations first before creating his GP listing. I find things flow much better doing that first. Good luck, will be watching!

from my test on google with places it seems if you can get a good directory with say doctor and you have the same words on your site it works wonders im bouncing about a little my self but starting too see some major improvements over time i did not actualy know untill tonight there was loads of competition i have a feeling as well video you have to have at least five and you will kill the competition i have moved from page 14 to page 7 in about two to three weeks putting on facebook seems to have really moved it good luck

Today I didn't have time to get the GP listing verified by phone. I did manage to create citations at kudzu and superpages and when they start showing up I'll ping them. It was a time consuming task, not difficult but just drudgery. I'm going to do just a few at a time so I don't get to a point where I'm going to hate doing them.

It's kind of strange that the auto generated GP listing doesn't show up in the search results at all. Maybe after verification it'll show up.

go to wlmarketing.com and order local business listings. at least do the miminum package of 35 although if you can do 100 it's recommended. they'll create a lot of citations, including the big review sites you need right now.

jeffnaz said:

go to wlmarketing.com and order local business listings. at least do the miminum package of 35 although if you can do 100 it's recommended. they'll create a lot of citations, including the big review sites you need right now.

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Thanks for that suggestion. I'm considering outsourcing it since it will be a pain in the wrist to personally register at a 100 or more sites. Do you know if they can submit to a list that I provide or is that option is unavailable? Sounds like you've used their service before and was happy with their work, am I correct?

Got the phone verification done this afternoon and now Dr. M's GP listing is showing up on page 7. There's 11 pages worth so just by the verification we jumped ahead 4 pages.

I used pingfarm to ping 3 citations at insiderpages, kudzu and superpages. I'm leaning seriously toward jeffnaz's suggestion to use the services of wlmarketing.com to get 100 citation created for only $40.

Tomorrow morning I going to clean the carpets at Dr. M's office and I'll shoot a quick video of him talking about his practice. I'm planning on posting the video on youtube and put the youtube video on his website and in the GP listing.

I ordered 100 citations from wlmarketing this afternoon. They kicked my order back and placed it on hold because the website hastily created was lacking sufficient content for submission to local directories. My plan was to build out the site the next few days the same time they're doing the citations but now I'll have to move it up the schedule. So this evening I worked on getting enough propaganda on the website so they can proceed with the citations tomorrow. I came up with a sort of BH way to get some quick content. I found a site that had a layout similar to what I had in mind and did a copy and paste job just so I could get the citation work started. I'm going to spend the next few days rewriting the content so to avoid duplicate content.

The GP listing is not on page 7 anymore, in fact it has totally disappeared. Is that the Google dance happening to GP listings?

Hi radiant13,
+ repped you because:

- I am really interested in this currently
- You are looking at it from a no bs standpoint (you have an offline local business urself) and therefore this experiment should be a great one
- I want you to keep this thread up


I will be following this closely

I got sufficient content on the website to enable the citation work to start now. i sure hope I can pull this off as fast as possible cuz my cleaning business is dead in the water this week as I don't have a single job on the schedule. When a small business owner is out of work you can't collect unemployment, that just doesn't seem right. But enough whining, I'm also going to work on revamping my cleaning website to get it to rank higher and convert better. I'm going to chronicle that progress here also as a related project, one that is trying to boost an existing GP listing higher.

ezlegion said:

Hi radiant13,
+ repped you because:

- I am really interested in this currently
- You are looking at it from a no bs standpoint (you have an offline local business urself) and therefore this experiment should be a great one
- I want you to keep this thread up


I will be following this closely

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Thanks for stopping by. I'm hoping I can earn some income doing this sort thing and so are you, am I correct? I need to get this as another source of income as my cleaning business is just barely keeping me afloat.
I'm going to see this thread through and that's a promise.

You are correct however I'm real pushed time wise to get serious currently

radiant13 said:

Thanks for stopping by. I'm hoping I can earn some income doing this sort thing and so are you, am I correct? I need to get this as another source of income as my cleaning business is just barely keeping me afloat.
I'm going to see this thread through and that's a promise.

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I have subscribed to this tread, interesting case study, keep it up. Have you ever used ubot studio, zenno poster, or AutoIT(free)? if so you can use these to automate citation submissions, or at least help.

whats the population of the city ur attempting to place for?

NawtyAtNight said:

I have subscribed to this tread, interesting case study, keep it up. Have you ever used ubot studio, zenno poster, or AutoIT(free)? if so you can use these to automate citation submissions, or at least help.

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No have not. I'll check them out, thanks for the lead. I started using lastpass but it only helps a small part of the whole process. I rather use my time building the website for this go around. I might even outsource that in the future if this thing takes off for me.

gmarch25 said:

whats the population of the city ur attempting to place for?

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Over 74,000

There was a little glitch with my order over a wlmarketing and they didn't get it started until today after I inquired them about it. One day delay is no big since it could take over a month for the listing to get ranked by Big G.

I managed to redesign both my site and Dr. M's site. My site originally had only one page and I managed to get it to outrank sites with higher pr, but that was before GP even existed. I used to have the top position in GP but I've fallen to the bottom of the pack. One possible reason is that I'm located near the outskirts of town and have heard that G is ranking you according to how close you are to the center of town. I've added two video testimonials and one written review to my listing. I've also put those same two videos on my website. They were originally uploaded to youtube.

Hey radiant, great thread, to speed up the process you can use also roboform, however I think if you can outsource it, it's the best way to go.

blackwp said:

Hey radiant, great thread, to speed up the process you can use also roboform, however I think if you can outsource it, it's the best way to go.

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I use lastpass which is similar to roboform but it only helps automate a small part so I outsourced it to wlmarketing.